ICANN Comments Pour In for Porn-Related gTLD Proposals

At post time, about 13 percent (776 of 6,151) of the comments on the ICANN Application Comments forum are directed at the three proposed gTLDs. ICANN started up the forum in early July and could green light some gTLDs as early as June 2013.

ICM Registry, which operates .XXX, has applied for .adult, .sex and .porn; Internet Marketing Solutions Ltd., meanwhile, has only applied for .sex.

Each of the 776 comments over one or more of the three extensions offers blunt criticism.

Headlines such as "Porn domain not needed or wanted," "Please don't make the world worse" and "No more indecency" are atypical, as are some of the contributors — one repeat poster is Morality in Media President Patrick Trueman.

And just today, Saudi Arabia's Communications and Information Technology Commission, the country's communications regulatory czar, has come out against the three gTLD proposals, as well as others, asking for ICANN to refuse the applications.

"Many individuals and societies find this string offensive on religious and/or cultural grounds," the Saudi Arabian regulating agency posted on the ICANN site. "We oppose the introduction of [these] gTLD [strings] on both of these grounds, and because pornography causes huge damage to society's social fabric.

"There are already thousands of pornographic websites on the Internet. Allowing the applied-for string to be registered, can only increase proliferation of pornographic websites and pornographic material that may be accessed on the internet, often without any restriction, by the world's population including, of course, children."